But the ripples cast out by the new international port also extended far beyond the economic sphere. The new port and its global communities contributed to profound transformations in Japanese society and culture and extended even as far as global cultural and material flows. They include the disruption of existing hierarchies, as the town’s radically new business practices rewarded flexible and entrepreneurial risk takers, raising them into the ranks of a new merchant elite while freezing out the conservative merchant houses of the Edo establishment. They include a subtle reorientation of both space and time, as Japanese merchants and even rural peasant producers became dependent on global market opportunities (and vulnerable to global disruptions) and as the need to exploit information advantages created a technological imperative for greater speed of communication. They include the transformation of local and regional identities, as Japanese people came to grips with the idea of a Japanese “nation” and its potential place in global political, military, and racial hierarchies. And they include the negotiation of Japan’s national identity and even its “brand” image in the global marketplace. They include the transformation of physical space, both in the reconfiguration of Japanese urban landscapes and in the transformations of Japanese bodies in response to new laws and customs relating to clothing, hairstyles, food, and public hygiene. And they include global transformations—such as the sudden and pervasive wave of japonisme with its profound effects on Euro-American aesthetics—in response to the insertion of Japanese material and visual culture into global flows.
The key mechanism of most of these transformations was not the reformist policies of the Meiji government (which came to power in 1868 but which began its concerted reform program only in the 1870s), but rather it was the commercial culture of the treaty port, which affected Japan’s economy and society as soon as the port opened in 1859 and which continued to work its transformative effects through the 1860s and beyond. Yokohama was a melting pot of goods, ideas, visual images and verbal representations, physical interactions, architectural and sartorial display, and technological importation, almost all of which were mediated by the port’s vibrant commercial culture. The profit-seeking agents of change were not just the merchants trading in cotton shirting, kelp, silk thread, or agar-agar. They included the writers, Japanese and foreign, who aimed to profit from domestic and global curiosity about Yokohama, Japan, and the world. They included the producers of cartoons, prints, photographs, and other visual media that contributed to new domestic and global understandings of “Japan” and its place in the world. They included performers who circulated new images of Japanese physical prowess throughout the world. They included craftsmen and artisans who made exquisite products for foreign collectors, contributing to a growing appreciation for Japan’s manufacturing skills and design aesthetic. They included tailors, launderers, barbers, cooks, butchers, and countless other petty tradesmen and women who came to Yokohama in search of opportunity and who contributed to the transformation of Japanese lifestyles. And they included servants, coolies, prostitutes, and entertainers, who, through their physical interactions with the global communities of Yokohama, contributed to the complex transformations of Japanese bodily practice during the 1860s and beyond.
Most newcomers to Yokohama came in search of economic opportunity. Virtually every space in the town’s Japanese and foreign settlements, on its waterfront, and in its licensed entertainment and brothel district was dedicated to commerce in one form or another, and just about everything in Yokohama was for sale. It was out of this mundane venality as much as the modernizing idealism of government leaders that the seeds of social, cultural, and economic change were planted. Each of the participants in this marketplace may have felt relatively powerless to affect the course of events, but collectively they were the agents of extraordinary change.
This book focuses as much as possible on the mundane actors in Yokohama’s daily life: merchants, tradesmen, artists, performers, laborers, and entertainers. In particular, the book focuses on the experiences of one man, Shinohara Chūemon, and his family. Why Chūemon in particular? The simple answer is that a record of his life has survived. The records of ordinary people are hard to recover at the best of times, and the archival records of Yokohama have suffered from repeated destruction in devastating fires, the massive 1923 earthquake that leveled the city, and the appalling bombings of World War II. Chūemon left behind a remarkable personal archive that includes a collection of 367 letters written between 1859 and 1873, most of them from Chūemon to his eldest son, Shōjirō. Thanks to the care and attention of his descendants, this archive has survived down to the present day. Currently the manuscript archive is housed in the Yamanashi Prefectural Museum, while the letters were transcribed and published back in the 1950s. This archival record represents a unique window into the daily life of Yokohama’s Japanese merchant community in the 1860s.
Chūemon is a richly rewarding subject in all sorts of ways. His personal experiences and daily life reveal a man of rare enterprise and determination. During the course of his decade and more in Yokohama he experienced devastating setbacks that might have made a lesser man give up and return to his comfortable home in the provinces. But Chūemon persevered, and eventually he prospered. The story of his prosperity reveals a great deal about the conditions for success in Yokohama’s competitive commercial marketplace. Chūemon also teaches us much about the relationships between the Yokohama marketplace and the provinces that fed Yokohama with its export goods (and sometimes purchased its import goods). To follow the story of Chūemon is to follow not only Yokohama’s growth and development but also its relationship to the rural hinterland of the Kantō region and beyond. Chūemon was not physically present in his home province during most of the period covered in this book, but his son Shōjirō remained in their ancestral home, managing the family farm and the family’s village responsibilities while also helping his father with his business activities. Kōshū (the Edo-era name for what is today Yamanashi prefecture) had a history of growing commercial ties with the shogunal capital of Edo. In this book, I show how the economy of Kōshū was pulled into the orbit of the new commercial center of Yokohama, with sometimes radical effects on its social and political structures.
There are many gaps in Chūemon’s record and many areas in which his experiences did not (based on the available archive) intersect with the larger stories of Yokohama’s first decade. On these occasions, I have not hesitated to move away from Chūemon’s life in order to present a wider portrait of the Yokohama community. The book’s narrative, while loosely organized around a chronological account of Chūemon’s life in Yokohama, goes back and forth in scale and focus between the granular microhistory of Chūemon’s record and the larger history of the town and its varied communities. To that end, I have drawn on the archival records of many other participants in Yokohama’s Japanese and foreign communities, including shogunal officials, foreign merchants and diplomats, soldiers and sailors, authors and commentators, illustrators and artists, doctors and educators.
This book, then, is a double portrait of two remarkable actors: the irrepressible Shinohara Chūemon and the bustling new international port town of Yokohama. I hope that the one informs the other and that, when taken together, these portraits will help illuminate the mechanisms of social transformation in Japan during the Meiji Restoration and highlight the importance of transformative space in the study of social and economic change.
1 OUT OF THIN AIR (1859–1860)
FIGURE 1.1 The route from Kōshū to Edo and Yokohama. Map prepared by author
ON THE KŌSHŪ HIGHWAY
If we could travel back in time to April 3, 1859, we might see two travelers walking briskly along the Kōshū Kaidō highway absorbed in animated conversation. They are carrying packages strapped to their backs, wrapped in large pieces of indigo cloth knotted at the chest and waist. They wear conical hats to ward off sun and rain, and, like most travelers on the road, they wea
r simple straw sandals on their feet. Their cotton robes are hitched above the knees for ease of movement and to protect them from the mud of the road; their legs are tightly wrapped in cotton leggings.
Woodblock prints of Japan’s five major highways (the Tōkaidō, Nakasendō, Nikkō Kaidō, Kōshū Kaidō, and Ōshū Kaidō) allow us to imagine the appearance and surroundings of these travelers. On either side of the wide, well-swept dirt road farmers are busy puddling rice fields in preparation for the spring planting, pruning their fruit trees and mulberry bushes, or pulling heavy wooden plowshares through the fallow wheat and cotton fields. The road is lined in some places with mature pine trees, in others with wooden stalls offering goods and refreshments to the passersby: a cup of tea poured over rice and sucked down sitting on a low wooden bench, straw sandals at a few mon for the pair, a bag of dried fruits, or a handful of roasted chestnuts. In the distance on all sides is a ring of mountains, those in the foreground green with tea and mulberry fields, the high mountains behind still white with snow. To the south, towering over them all like a god in the land of giants is the massive white cone of Mount Fuji.
Our travelers’ names are Gorōemon and Chūemon. The suffix “-emon” was originally a marker of rank reserved for the court aristocracy in Kyoto, but over time the urban and rural classes appropriated it, and by now it was in common use among farmers, merchants, and townsmen. The same is true of the travelers’ shaved heads and topknots: they were originally the style of the warrior class but are now almost universal—the exceptions being monks and the very poor—differing only in the degree of grooming. Well-tended men like Chūemon have their hair dressed once or twice a week, shaving their scalp smooth and oiling their hair before fastening it in a tight knot on the crown.
These men are not young. Chūemon is fifty, a considerable age for an era in which the average life expectancy is still in the thirties. “Compared with the world of the Buddhas, a man’s fifty years are but a dream.”1 But Chūemon is still very much in the flow of life. His deeply tanned face is a little lined, a little weather-beaten. But it is a handsome face, delicate featured with a small upturned nose, high cheekbones, and large, well-shaped ears. He is a trim, spare man, with fine, long-fingered hands. His age and his self-confidence give him a certain dignity, in spite of his simple traveling clothes.
FIGURE 1.2 Keisai Eisen, Kōnosu, from the series Sixty-Nine Stations of the Kiso Kaidō (ca. 1835–1840). Courtesy of Richard Kruml, http://www.japaneseprints-london.com/
For farmers like Chūemon, this is a busy time of year. The spring silkworm-rearing season is about to begin, cotton and wheat are going into the ground, and the paddies must be prepared for the May rice planting. The slack season is in the winter, a time when people who can afford it go on trips to hot springs or to visit relatives in Edo.
But Chūemon is leaving his son to manage the farm. He has an important mission that requires his presence elsewhere. Chūemon, a provincial farmer from the mountain-ringed province of Kōshū, is on his way to Edo, the capital of the Tokugawa shoguns, to request permission to open a shop in a town that does not yet exist, to begin trading with foreigners who might never arrive, in a language he does not understand or speak, and in commodities for which there is no proven demand.
Who is this man, and what has set him off on this surprising mission?
Chūemon’s village, Higashi-Aburakawa, was one of hundreds that sprawled across the Kōshū tableland, a small but heavily populated and strategically important region in the mountains west of the shogunal capital. Although the region is surrounded by mountains, it offers benign conditions for agriculture. At an elevation of only a thousand feet, its soil is enriched by the volcanic minerals and abundant water resources of the turbulent mountains. Encircled as it was, it trapped sunshine and heat, giving it a longer growing season than most regions and lending it to the cultivation of warm-weather crops such as fruit and cotton. Kōshū was also one of the leading silk-producing districts in Japan. “What did you receive as souvenirs from Kōshū?” went a local folk song, “Striped silk and dried grapes.”2
In the 1850s, the villages in the western part of the tableland, including Higashi-Aburakawa, specialized in cotton, while those to the east grew mulberry for silkworm cultivation. Fruit cultivation, including grapes, apples, persimmons, pomegranates, peaches, and pears, was carried out in specialized clusters of villages. Kōshū’s famous grapes, for example, were grown in villages near the highway post station of Katsunuma.3 In addition, farmers grew a variety of other commercial crops, including tobacco, nuts, and vegetables, as well as rice, grains, and vegetables for home consumption.
This land had close ties to Edo and to the shogunate. Until the sixteenth century Kōshū was the stronghold of the powerful Takeda family, whose most famous leader, Takeda Shingen, was a contender for national hegemony. However, in 1575 Shingen’s son Katsuyori was crushed by Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu, and since the turn of the seventeenth century the Tokugawa family had ruled Kōshū province. In spite of its violent beginning, their rule was for the most part benevolent. As a directly controlled territory of the Tokugawa shogunate, Kōshū was governed by three daikan, or governors. The Isawa daikan had jurisdiction over the area surrounding Kōfu, which included Higashi-Aburakawa.
Higashi-Aburakawa was a village of forty families, situated in the crook of two rivers, the Fuefuki and its tributary, the Aburakawa. The entire village was no more than one hundred acres in extent. Like much of the Kōfu basin, the district was prone to flooding when the snows melted and the rainy season came in early summer. Even in the 1950s, Chūemon’s great-great-grandson Shinohara Yukio recalls having had to paddle to school in a boat when the roads were inundated. But the rivers also brought abundant irrigation and the promise of fertile soil and good crops.
This was perhaps the kind of community that Francis Hall had in mind when he wrote in 1865 of the prosperous villages of the Edo hinterland, villages where “there were no signs but those of peaceful industry and content, each hamlet to all intents a little republic by itself, knowing little and caring less for the outside world; to whom a change of rulers or revolution in the State would have no significance as great as the death of their own nanooshi or headman—people who know no oppression because they feel none, whose lives have fewer disturbing elements, perhaps, than any other people on whom the sun in its daily revolution falls.”4
But appearances could be deceptive. In Higashi-Aburakawa, as in most villages of the Kantō and surrounding areas, the benefits of the land were hardly shared by all. In Higashi-Aburakawa, seven families controlled 72 percent of all the village’s agricultural production, while twenty-six families had between them just 12 percent. Unable to feed themselves from their land, these marginal families survived by hiring themselves out for day labor, sending their children into service, and finding whatever employment they could to feed those they could not send away. The most prosperous families, on the other hand, had enough to live a comfortable life, to educate their children, to travel, to experiment with new agricultural methods, or invest in new business opportunities. These were the families that Chūemon grew up with: the Okamura family, who were Chūemon’s in-laws (he had married the daughter of Okamura Kanpei); the Komazawa family, whose heir, Buzaemon, was one of Chūemon’s closest friends and collaborators; and the wealthy Yamashita family, whose heir, Matsujirō, was to be one of Chūemon’s close business associates.
Chūemon’s own family, the Shinohara, was not the wealthiest in the village. Their five acres of land put them in the ranks of the haves, but at least four other families had greater holdings. But their landholdings and associated business activities did lend them status as a part of the local elite—the gōnō class, that group of wealthy farmers who were to play such an influential role in the political and economic life of Japan for the rest of the nineteenth century. As a member of this class, Chūemon had political obligations and privileges: his family was one of the designated nanushi
(headmen) of the village. This hereditary position rotated in Higashi-Aburakawa between families, and the Shinoharas usually took the position in alternate years. Chūemon’s membership in the gōnō class also made him a part of a densely connected network of men of similar background throughout the region. These were men whose ties transcended village boundaries. As a class they socialized, they intermarried, they studied together and implemented agricultural and other reforms, and together they invested their surplus capital in an increasingly vigorous regional network of commercial enterprise.
Although firmly grounded in agriculture, the economy of the Kōshū region had become highly commercialized over the past century. The region’s agricultural abundance, its position on the periphery of the Kantō Plain, and its long-standing ties to the shogunal administration all made it a natural supplier to the rapidly growing consumer market in Edo. After the devastating wars of the sixteenth century, Edo had become the political center of the regime of the Tokugawa family of shoguns. As a political measure, all Japan’s daimyo—feudal lords—were required to reside in Edo in alternate years, and their wives and children were required to live there permanently. This concentration of Japan’s wealthiest barons and their samurai retainers generated growing demand for the artisans and commercial houses that supplied their needs. By the mid-eighteenth century, Edo was among the biggest cities in the world, with a population of more than one million and a vibrant urban consumer culture.
Kōshū supplied Edo and the regional centers that grew up around it with agricultural staples such as rice and wheat, as well as with specialty products like grapes, tobacco, cotton, and silk. By the mid-nineteenth century, most farmers with access to mulberry gained extra income by cultivating silkworms. Some would add a little extra value at home by unspooling the cocoons and reeling silk thread. Some even produced woven silk cloth. Many sold their cocoons to the commercial houses of Kōfu and other local towns, where an industry had grown up spinning and weaving silk and cotton. The final product was shipped down the Kōshū highway to the silk market in Hachiōji on the Kantō Plain or directly to one of the licensed silk wholesalers in Edo. As a result of these developments, many farming families made more income from cash crops like cotton, tobacco, and silk than from their traditional farming activities. Some, like the Shinohara, became quite wealthy in the process.
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